Discussion » Questions » Health and Wellness » In the past three weeks 16 people have died from the corona virus. In the same three weeks over 4000 peeps died from drug overdose.

In the past three weeks 16 people have died from the corona virus. In the same three weeks over 4000 peeps died from drug overdose.

Still scared?

Posted - March 8, 2020

Responses


  • 10026
    Is it the fear of the virus vs. drugs?  We take a drug for the virus.  It's all a big mess.
    We are all going to die.  How we do it is what most fear. This post was edited by Merlin at March 9, 2020 3:09 PM MDT
      March 8, 2020 1:31 PM MDT
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  • 4631
    It's true.
    I don't mind dying - not even slightly.

    But I do mind the fact that most ways of dying are very unpleasant.
    I intend to give myself a nice quiet, painless EXIT when the natural time draws near.



      March 8, 2020 10:53 PM MDT
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  • 14795
    Death by cuddles is the way to go.....lol
      March 9, 2020 5:32 PM MDT
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  • 52905

      Keep on mind that many, MANY people 

    A. advocate for the legalization of several types of drugs that are currently listed as illegal 

    B. ignore the damage that irresponsible use of drugs (both the legal kind and the illegal kind) is doing

    C. glorify the use and the misuse of drugs, as evidenced by the hooting, hollering, laughter, cheers and applause whenever a comedian cracks a joke about being high, being strung out on drugs, nearly overdosing, having a stash, manufacturing drugs, buying drugs, selling drugs, concealing drugs, getting away with it, etc.

    D. turn a blind eye to the way Big Pharma enriches the wallets of its executives and stockholders by pushing prescription drugs just as effectively as criminal kingpins push illegal drugs 



    Actions such as those are not conducive to being scared about 4,000 people dying from drug overdoses in any three-week period. 



      March 8, 2020 1:58 PM MDT
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  • 44175
    I was talking about being scared about the virus. Also...missing periods for A, B and D.
      March 8, 2020 5:12 PM MDT
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  • 52905

      I know exactly to what you refer in your post: the virus itself and not the drug use/associated deaths. My reply is meant to show your example of the drug use and associated deaths pales because even though it’s a more grave issue, it is not met with serious thought on the parts of many people. If they care little about a worse issue, then this virus is merely enjoying its current heyday as topic of the week or month, and soon will be swept under the carpet when replaced by the next new fad of the day. 


    The periods are not missing, they are purposely omitted because this is a list of items being posted, not standard sentences. In Item C. shows a period only because the Latin two-word phrase et cetera is abbreviated, and style guides require that a period follow it. 

    et cetera
    et cet·er·a /et ˈsedÉ™rÉ™/adverb
    1. used at the end of a list to indicate that further, similar items are included.
      "we're trying to resolve problems of obtaining equipment, drugs, et cetera"


      ~
     
      March 8, 2020 11:51 PM MDT
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  • 44175
    I assumed they were continuations of the ..., MANY people...
      March 9, 2020 2:37 PM MDT
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  • 10449
    People are weird.  There's not a vaccine for the virus yet and already they're taking too much of it.
      March 8, 2020 1:59 PM MDT
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  • 6988
    Recently, I visited a General Motors facility. The security guard made me fill out a form that asked me if I had been in any certain countries such as China, Iran, etc.
      March 8, 2020 2:05 PM MDT
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  • 52905
    The point being?

    :|
      March 8, 2020 2:11 PM MDT
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  • Not of either one, no. The chances of me dying from coronavirus (if I even get it) are very slim and I don't do drugs, so there's no chance of that being my demise either. 
      March 8, 2020 5:03 PM MDT
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  • 13251
    Comma needed after 16 weeks.
      March 8, 2020 5:06 PM MDT
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  • 44175
    It's ...weeks, 16...
    How could discorrectly make a correction?
      March 8, 2020 5:09 PM MDT
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  • 13251
    Sorry, comma needed after three weeks. Same mistake, different time.
      March 8, 2020 10:20 PM MDT
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  • 4631
    As a stand alone statement, this post is hilarious.

    Since you're an excellent grammarian, Stu, I presume the proposed mis-position of the comma is tongue-in-cheek


      March 8, 2020 10:38 PM MDT
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  • 13251
    It was a serious correction. The statement should read, "In the past three weeks, 16 people have died from the coronavirus."
      March 9, 2020 7:50 AM MDT
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  • 44175
    That is correct.
      March 9, 2020 2:39 PM MDT
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  • 13251
    Indeed,
      March 9, 2020 5:15 PM MDT
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  • 4631
    Ten plagues that changed the world:

     

    10. Plague of Athens

    9. Camp Fever

    8. Smallpox

    7. Asian Flu

    6. Tuberculosis

    5. The Plague of Justinian

    4. The Antonine Plague

    3. HIV/AIDS

    2. The Spanish Flu

    1. The Black Death

    One of the worst things one can do is dismiss the potential harm of a pandemic.

    Even one person choosing not to take precautions can spread it to countless others 
    with exponential consequences.

    If the current rate of infections is not successfully quarantined,
    it will soon make the statistics for death by drug overdoses look trivial.

      March 8, 2020 6:00 PM MDT
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  • 16199
    The danger of COVID-19 has been largely overplayed by the media. It's flu. Like the Spanish flu, its a more virulent strain than normal, but even so, most of those infected will only have mild symptoms (If any) and make a full recovery.

    And from one frustrated Aussie to another - copious amounts of toilet paper will NOT help. Almost all of our TP is made in Millicent, South Australia.
      March 8, 2020 11:15 PM MDT
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  • 13251
    The following is a very thoughtful and instructive piece written by a physician. The mass hysteria and panic are bigger and worse than the disease itself:

    The world is caught in the vortex of the coronavirus story. So what happens from here?

    I don’t know, and no one else does either. That said, my intuition—based on the temporal and spatial dispersion of the first 16 domestic cases of coronavirus serologically confirmed in the United States—is that the situation is not inconsistent with a high-prevalence virus that has been endemic in America during this flu season and is still circulating. But what happens as more and more testing kits are delivered into an existing high-prevalence setting? Prevalence starts getting counted as incidence, and that could send people running for the hills.

    Consider the following analogy. Think about prevalence as the gold that was sitting in the Sierras in early 1848, and incidence as the collection of eureka moments thereafter. Just because gold diggers discover more and more gold in the Sierras doesn’t mean gold is spreading. What is spreading is the word about gold, which attracts more gold diggers, who discover more gold, forming a self-reinforcing frenzy.

    The prevalence of coronavirus, of course, is more dynamic. Unlike gold, it does spread. But also unlike gold, it disappears when a patient gets better, which we know has been happening in the vast majority of cases so far. What we don’t know is the true prevalence, and how endemic it has been this season—it could be in the millions for Americans already—because we weren’t looking for it until this particular story entered our collective consciousness in recent weeks. And now the labs are playing catch up.

    But here’s the catch. A surge in testing—one that seems poised to commence after a slow rollout and criticism—will inevitably show a significant increase in serologically confirmed cases. When the existing prevalence of a virus is high and endemic, the rise in incidence of testing can create the appearance of a rise in incidence of a virus.

    Nonetheless, the demand for such circumspection, or any circumspection for that matter, during the current hysteria is understandably anemic. Instead, this is that part of the horror movie where the good intentions of good actors—the companies and agencies rising to the challenge of producing testing kits at an exponentially faster rate than during the 2003 SARS panic—end up serving the interest of the antagonist (the mob) rather than the protagonist (public interest). In an environment when the increasingly unhinging mob is already competing with each other to paint the worst possible portrait of the next several weeks, the bad-news industrial-complex is about to strike gold: They will soon get to spread the word “spread.”

    From there, the panic can drive itself. As more cases are serologically confirmed, perceptions of a spreading plague will spread, triggering demand for more testing, which will lead to more confirmed cases in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Such vicious cycles that promote runaway growth of fear are the anathema of a society that relies on stability, security and confidence. Feed-forward loops are the preferred algorithms of all self-expanding beasts, including cancer.

    Confidence is already in short supply in some quarters. Even basic things like numbers and definitions are being called into question. Meanwhile, people are panic selling the stock market and panic buying the remaining stock in supermarkets. Discretionary events are being cancelled in droves and handshakes are becoming an etiquette indiscretion. Adults are working from home, and kids with sniffles of any origin are being sent home from school to join them. During this “seeing-UFOs” phase of mass hysteria, everything from allergies and anxiety can start to look like the coronavirus given the fluidity of definitions and overlapping symptoms. Imagine the specter of this potentially absurd situation: The background prevalence of endemic coronavirus may be falling as the flu season fades, but the bad news bearers keep pointing to the rising incidence of test-affirmed coronavirus. The numbers are bound to look dramatically worse in the coming days and weeks, so the worst of the panic may be ahead of us.

    If all of this feels a bit like we are in the Twilight Zone, that’s because we are. What I mean is that we are already in the twilight of the flu season. If SARS CoV2 turns out to be just a Kafka-esque guest who has been among us for the 2019 to 2020 flu season, then at some point the meticulously recorded and earnestly reported “incidence growth” of coronavirus will stall and fall—thereby releasing the spellbound public from self-captivity and other forms of quarantine. Before we know it everyone will be saying, “I knew it,” and this horror story about the plague of the century could fade into a vague memory as if it never happened.

    But before that happens, we should really get to the bottom of this while we are caught in the vortex of fear lest we want to be visited by unwanted sequels every two to five years. At the center of this powerful vortex is the principal agent problem that infected human civilization at its roots at the end of the kin tribe age of human social evolution. Whereas humans were once fed, informed and governed by those who had our best interest at heart (a biological algorithm known as inclusive fitness), in post-diaspora melting pots we are fed, informed and governed by those who have their own best interest at heart. Without mutual kin skin in the game to protect against self-dealing, powerful institutions began arising all over the ancient world that ruled over instead of on behalf of the people. Today’s fake news, fake foods and fake leadership culture are all catalyzed by the same underlying cause of misaligned incentives that have been derailing human sociality and befuddling revolutionaries for thousands of years. It was The Who—not to be confused with the WHO—who pointed out that the new boss is always the same as the old boss.

    So what I hope happens to the story from here is that we begin addressing the first-order cause of human social dysfunctions rather than whack-a-moling its second-order symptoms. Simply put, our family values did not scale as we globalized, but virality has. The aggregate sum of everyone’s wonderful instincts to provide for family—the profit motive in today’s world—has produced the unintended externality of the principal agent problem in the post kin tribe era of human evolution. We propose a radically different path forward: by innovating new forms of inclusive stakeholding beyond just kin skin in the game—to align institutions with the people and people with each other—competition and natural inclinations will select for race-to-the-top global outcomes rather than race-to-the-bottom ones.

    That’s a self-reinforcing trend I can get behind.

      March 9, 2020 8:55 AM MDT
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  • 44175
    You forgot the Plague of Trump.
      March 9, 2020 2:42 PM MDT
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  • 5391

    On average, 400,000 people die annually from the effects of cigarettes; and 3,300 people die in auto accidents EVERY DAY. Yet we still smoke and drive, (often simultaneously) without much of a fuss on the front pages. Is it because we have heard it too many times? 

    By what standard is this coronavirus so much more urgent than an infinitely greater sadness that seldom makes any news, the product of our collective failure as a sentient species: 600 children worldwide die of starvation EVERY HOUR. 
    What are our priorities? 

      March 8, 2020 9:04 PM MDT
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  • 4631
    Point well made.

    Maybe the intensity of concern is that while a potential pandemic is still in relatively small outbreaks it is still possible to contain and prevent it. Even the costs are affordable when compared with the costs of not taking action.

    With these other chronic problems such as deaths from overdoses, chronic addiction and starvation, the physical and finacial means of cure and prevention seem to be beyond possible.
    Actually, I don't believe they are incurable -
    but it does seem that societies become habituated to these horrors -
    much like the way smaller gun massacres are no longer reported because they're too common and not considered "news."


    This post was edited by inky at March 9, 2020 9:59 PM MDT
      March 8, 2020 10:44 PM MDT
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